The Rock n' Roll Spirit of John Goodman (Is In Me)

Goodbye.

Sorry, Tumblr, I thought you would be so much more than what you actually are. It’s unfortunate that I leave you now but I don’t regret it and doubt I will. 

PROOF THAT COFFEE ROCKS

I wrote and FINISHED an entire story today, killer timing. That’s two so far this week, am pumped and hopefully I can get another done by Sunday. Before then I have to prepare for Bunch of Bands, going to kick ass. Speaking of which I wrote and FINISHED an entirely new song FOR Bunch of Bands and eventually The Velveeta Underground (Concerts), and hopefully everyone else in the Rock and Roll Spirit of John Goodman is willing and able to get it ready by Thursday. 

Good start to the week. KEEP IT UP!

PS- Dipped on a Borders clearance sale and grabbed some Vonnegut, Toole and Burroughs. I will miss you Borders, but not your prices. 

HERE IN ONE MILLION YEARS

There are probably a few reasons why I’m down here, toes crinkling in the sand, little flecks digging in the spaces beneath my nails. There are almost definitely a few reasons why I’m here, more than few, the bubbles up and down my neck, sneaking around like impossible insects, remind me that I shouldn’t be here, but I am. I am and there are more than a few reasons why I am here, I am sure of that. The darkness is really the only thing I can see and remember, at the moment at least, so I’ll tell you about the darkness.

                You were seventy five years old when you died.

                You lived a happy life.   

                You had a spouse and two children who went on to be more successful than you, just what you wanted.

                You paid off your home insurance the year before you died, all those trips out of the country set you back but you knew it was worth it.

                Now I’m remembering too.

                Once you told me that you didn’t believe in words, like they couldn’t exist or weren’t a matter of fact. You can disagree with words, you can’t not believe in them.

                I told you that and you became angry.

                “Why not?” you asked me, stamping your foot, you were like a child then, you still are, only taller and wider.

                “Because,” I inhaled deeply, a friend once taught me to meditate that way, and exhaled, a stretched sigh that bubbled past both our lips up to the invisible surface. The sand shifted under our weight, our hearts beating slower and slower, somehow in time.

                When you walk alongside someone you slowly begin to find each other’s step and soon you are marching together in time. When that would happen you would purposefully skip a step to avoid it, especially with your sister.

                “How is your sister?”

                “What about her?”

                “How is she?” I asked you this long ago, but you don’t remember it.

                “She’s fine.”

                “How long has it been since you two have spoken?”

                “Long enough.”

                “And that is?” you were angry again as I pressed you for answers, doing your best to avoid my gaze even though we both were blind under the sea there, coral in the way of everything, growing. Coral is an animal, most don’t realize, alive and being and a part of the… well it isn’t a stone.

                You stayed silent for a long time, it might have been eons, but you didn’t say a word, not one.

                “Yesterday?” I continued. You smiled to yourself at this question, yes I could see you, and you smiled like you were remembering a memory, a nice one.

                “No,” you stayed flat after your smile had faded back into the recesses of your lips.

                “A week?”

                “No.”

                “Do you remember when you stood in the bathroom at the subway after you had missed your train and you were angry? There was a man who stood beside you in the bathroom, in the long line of urinals even though there were fifty more available. Do you remember what he did? He asked you a question, do you remember that question?”

                “Was that you?”

                “Does it matter?”

                “To me it does.”

                “What did he ask you?” it was my turn to smile, and a gulp of air escaped from between my teeth to brush past the scales and vacant eyes of thousands of fish. They swim and never feel anything but hunger, not even pain, not even anxiety, not even the water that surrounds them.

                “He asked me if I knew any good cab companies.”

                “Did he?”

                “Yes, he did, I think so.”

                “Why did he do that?”

                “He wanted a cab I suppose.”

                He did not ask you that, he asked you a different question, something you would never remember because you didn’t want to. In your frustration at the inanimate train and faceless crowds that never seemed to care but were always with you, you blocked it out. It’s like it never happened. He asked you if you thought it was better to piss in the water of the urinal or the side of the bowl. He said he didn’t like pissing in the water because he knew everyone would hear it and it would make him self-conscious. He said he didn’t like pissing in the bowl because he knew everyone would know he was avoiding the water because he was self-conscious, so he would feel just as bad.

                “Are you jealous of the fish?” you asked me.

                You didn’t respond to him, you walked away. He said as you flushed, “I just don’t want the world listening to me piss is all.” You asked around for a good cab company and took it to your meeting; they didn’t mind that you were late.

                “Am I jealous of the fish?”

                “Yes.”

                “Why?”

                “Why are you jealous of the fish or why did I ask you this question?”

                “You pick,” your hand shot to your pocket as I said this, but there was no bulge there, no nothing at all, only water, and the trail of bubbles left from your sweeping arm.

                From somewhere above us the sun broke through the algae and shined down on our faces, you weren’t surprised to see me at all.

                “Is this-,” you started, but my hand stopped you.

                “Don’t ask that question.” You took it quietly, but couldn’t cover a thing.

                “They don’t feel anything you know,” it’s like you were reading my mind then, “and they just spend all day going back and forth looking for food and screwing their mates and lounging in the grass when the bigger fish come by. They never look up for the sunlight because it was never there in the first place, so when it finally does shine down they get confused and don’t know what to do. They should swim upward, escape whatever this is, but they don’t know that and no one else ever knew it or told them to so why bother? Then the sun is gone and they’ve lost their only chance. They’ll tell their kids about the mysterious whatever years later,” you paused to swallow water and spit dirt back up, “but they won’t know either, it’s a mess.”

                “You’re right.”

                The sun appeared again.

                “It is a mess.”

                As it faded the sapphire of the sea around us faded too, and the darkness emerged from wherever it hides when everything else appears. The deep tinge of blue enveloped everything again, slowly moving and twisting through the sleek currents. This way could take to places you have never been before, to roads and homes frequented only once by their builders. If there were more left in this country to explore, you and I would be there to find and name it.

                Do you remember the man that walked past your home every morning in the purple jacket and red hair? He carried a pink walking stick you assumed he used to scare away the neighborhood dogs. You told yourself you would never be like that man; that you would never force yourself to walk aimlessly just to get out of your cage. His face was oblong and never set in stone but still it did not change, did not find a new shape, and you pitied him for it.

                Do you remember standing at your window with your cup of two dollar coffee pitying a man you never met?

                You lived feet from him.

                He lived and breathed.

                He had a life full of memory and others just like you.

                And you pitied him.

                Do you remember that?

                “Can I ask you a question?” you said, peering carefully through the sludge we had made with our feet, we were walking then, sliding our bare palms along the ocean floor. Something told me that you didn’t remember what tectonic plates were. “Can I ask you a question?” you tried again when I did not answer. Sometimes I forget to answer, don’t take it personally.

                “Can I ask you a question?” the third time is always the charm, and then I looked up to match your gaze, it was something I didn’t recognize, there was something there that had always been but never shown, always.

                “When you recited your wedding vows, did you mean them?” I asked you, ignoring your question and the one you had yet to ask.

                “I- I most certainly did,” only you would hesitate, no one else would. How does that make you feel? “Can I ask you a question?” somehow you thought repetition meant success. We can’t all be Thomas Edison, though, can we?

                “In millions of years all humans will be gone and all the guns, flags, and computers will have melted away, back into the earth and whatever it might be at that point. The only thing left will be bones. In ten thousand million years when extra-terrestrials finally find this place or humans have started anew, all they will have to remember us by is our bones, the big stacks of them, piled in landfills and buried in trash. Death pits, that’s what they will think of, amorphous bodies squeezed together by the thousands, swimming skinless in huge pools of mud and sweat. When the body odor and smoke finally clear and they see us for what we really are there won’t be a point to it, they’ll just vomit and go home.”

                “Can I ask you a question?”

                “How does that make you feel?” your body did not match your mind, but that’s true for us all.

                I am not one of you.

                “Can I ask you a question?”

                This blob of molecules is so pathetically insignificant that if you’re lucky enough to escape then you’re probably dead already, so don’t take your chances with something that won’t matter. Think big you snide shit.

                “Ask your question,” I finally said. The ocean vents and faults burped lava and they warmed our purple feet.

                The sun burst through, and it stayed. The fish with teeth longer than your finger screamed in agony and sped for their havens. The sharks that inhabited the deep meandered back to where food was scarce and life common.

                “Is this purgatory?”

                We stood there, watching nothing in particular, perhaps the magma in the earth emerging and becoming something new, a rebirth.

                “No.”

                “Is this heaven?”

                You began to float upwards to the sun, to the world above us both, I stayed quiet though, I knew it was for your own good.

                “That’s where you’ll be going next,” I managed, breathless as you neared the surface, the new countries and people.

                “Wait- who are you then?”

                You asked so many questions that day, or was it a century? Did it matter?

                “No.”

                “What does that mean?”

                That look in your eye, it was never there but always there, the man in the purple coat knew it well. You know I can never leave, you know I am one with the nothing.

                “Who are you?” you tried again, swimming against whatever was pulling you, to stay and keep me company.

All those reasons why I’m here don’t really matter because they all belong to you.  

                Maybe in one million years they will find all of our oil and water gone and won’t even bother finding the bones, they’ll be just like us. In fact I know they’ll be just like us because they will be us. One day we will come back to earth on our inter-galactic rockets and think we’ve found the perfect new home. Once all the buildings become one with the mountains again there will be nothing left to have. They will drop their bombs so that no one else can ever have this desolate place, a planet truly devoid of anything, but selfishness is their game. Maybe they will just blow it from the inside out, floating away into the void. When our fragments reach Mars were we even there? When some bits and pieces of me, recycled into dirt and lava meet the sun, was I ever alive? There aren’t any memories in the void; they are burned away like everything else.

                Then again, our bones might just fossilize into oil.

                “I’m the fucking anti-Christ.”

THE SOUND OF THE TREES AND PASSING CARS

I took the drive alone. 

I searched for a good place to watch the moon make its pass and think about the street lights that swelled and died every time I drove under. I thought of how scared she got when she talked about them, curled up in the backseat in a dreamworld, in a place where tennis balls fly over the darkest clumps of trees imaginable. In those places- when Sam says things in my ear but I don’t respond because I can’t understand- in those places are real fear. The clouds lurking up and beyond the sight of us five, slumped together in a creaking tent, stomach bubbling and boiling with a lost hunger, I should have eaten more. I should eat, I haven’t much in days, I’ve lost the sense of it. 

She tells me to eat with her pictures, still I can’t bring myself to do it. 

I watched the sun fall into the horizon while the rest of them walked away. They walked away from freedom. 

I had found myself alone earlier, in a decrepit campsite filled with mysterious mud and cautious cans of diet soda. Michael has his disease. One day it might kill him.

One day it might give him mortality. 

I searched for them in the woods. I followed paths that we had made earlier, forcing my body through the tightest gaps in the trees. The weight of the branches and a sudden sadness pissed me off, made me immune to the everywhere sticks and twigs that tore into my arms and made little red bumps rise along my ankles. 

Nothing. 

No one.

So when I watched that pack of hyenas streak across the gated fields under the sunset. So when we sat in that field and I couldn’t bring myself to say anything interesting. So when I was so angry I couldn’t feel anymore. I lost control. I was angry at the me I wanted to be, how different and how fucking pathetic it is. 

I should be content with this thing I’m trapped in, the burning fire behind my ears always reminding me that yes this is not the end yet and no this can’t ever begin but if you try really hard you might find a reason to hope and if that isn’t enough for you then run.

You’re right. I am running.

Right now I am turning around.

I am facing it full on, forcing my head through the hands of the waves and rubbing the ice into my pores. Before that moment alone I had temporarily forgotten to laugh. 

After burgers we lay in the tent.

She said something.

I smiled.

And then the floodgates eroded to dust, and then and only then could I yell. Now I can stop in the wettest of tunnels and find hope.

I will someday sit at a desk, wherever it is, and grin at whomever walks by and remember this time when I was afraid, too afraid to admit something, too afraid to say hello, too afraid to move closer, too afraid to eat. Turning away from the sun and the sound of the trains, watching the moon from the school parking lot where I grew up, being locked out of my home, it will make me laugh then. 

When I find my composure I’ll place both hands on my desk and trace swirls in the wood, and write.

Why couldn’t I have said this to you in the drains?

saturn by night

Camping with the team, the one that dreams. Something in that is funny, I hope. Three days and two nights.

The highway there gave me chills, made me feel trapped by the metal shapes moving back and forth, little commanders inside screaming and banging on the dashboards when I wouldn’t get out of their fucking way. Everyone around me was so loud, so angry, singing, punching the ceiling, away from here.

The man in the wrong pavilion showed us how not to get there, his advice was taken wholeheartedly, my chills traced down to the base of my spine where they sat for the next day.

We walked once we arrived, Brendan and I setting out to the unknown, something we never have at home. Through scratching underbrush we found a wall of stones, built by someone we’d never meet. We followed it. 

It took us over creeks and past trees with knots in them that looked like piglets curled up against the elements.

The lake was cold. Later we all fell in, so deep, I never felt so fresh.

The next day more of the people we wanted to run away from showed up, my funk was gone, did I mention it? Well- it was gone then and we shoved out into a new day. She gave Sam and Michael tattoos and we sang songs that streamed from our strangely frozen minds, one of Saturn and its inhabitants, the other of a tree in the night. 

We left.

On our way back a truck was painted “Sam”, I wonder if she thought it was supernatural guidance. I hope not.

I hope not.

It should rain today, I want to drive.  

when and where are they?

We turned onto the highway going far too fast with the lights out, every light. The dashboard was wiped clean, my face, the windows grimy and the thought of a deer leaping from the shadowy trees that lined the thing hovering between our ears. At least mine. Beside me he was foot to the floor, aching for more, a baseball bat and tennis ball in his trunk and a hill far away on his mind. He got there and whooped at the moon. 

We had defined the moon earlier.

We saw the lights, how they waited for us to pass beneath them like their children and get wide-eyed when they dripped up and out and over. Out. They would go. On. They would come.

On.

Off.

On.

Off.

1.

7.

I’ve lost count.

15.

27.

I’ve stopped counting.

When we find ourselves beneath the street lights they stare at us and blink, here and there like the animals that come out at night. We stare back and scratch our dirty heads.

For the life of me I don’t know what is going on.